Mike Monroe: Spurs ‘D’ rates an A by any analysis

Six weeks into a season that now finds his team atop the Western Conference standings, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich expressed cautious optimism that his players had taken to heart his admonition that they get back to the sort of defense that characterized championship runs in 1999, 2003, 2005 and 2007.

“We’re a better defensive team than last year,” he said in mid-December. “That was our goal coming into training camp. We couldn’t be 15th in the league, middle-of-the-road. We had to get closer to top five if we wanted to compete seriously at the end of the season. I think we’re moving towards that. Guys have focused on it pretty well, so, hopefully, we can sustain that.”

With roughly six weeks remaining in the regular season, Popovich’s team has reached the level of defensive excellence he believed necessary. The Spurs are third in the league in defensive efficiency, as measured by points allowed per 100 possessions. This is the new gold standard for measuring defensive performance because it allows for pace, something points allowed per game ignores.

The Spurs enter tonight’s game against the Bulls allowing 97.7 points per their opponents’ 100 possessions. Only the Pacers (95.5 points per 100) and Grizzlies (97.2) are more defensively efficient, according to this advanced basketball analytic. The Bulls (98.6) rank just behind them.

In years past, Popovich clung to field goal percentage defense as the best measure of his team’s defensive performance. Now, he accepts defensive efficiency as a more meaningful tool.

Don’t mistake the NBA’s oldest head coach (age 64) for the sort of sports analytics geek willing to sit through dozens of lectures at the recently concluded MIT-Sloan Sports Analytical Conference to learn what can be squeezed from the game’s statistics. But Popovich is not one to turn a blind eye to anything that can help his team, though he wants both the theory and the proof before putting anything to practice.

“I think (defensive field goal percentage) is the most basic measure,” Popovich said in December. “But now stats are so sophisticated. There are real stats and other stats. I understand most of it, but it has to be explained to me. I always want somebody to show me the formula. Nobody will show me a formula. I’m good on formulas. I took a lot of math classes, but nobody will show me a formula.

“It’s like the secret stuff in the back room, kind of like what the politicians are doing now.”

Remember, this was mid-December, when sequestration was still an economic concept, rather than a political reality.

Spurs general manager R.C. Buford participated in a panel at the MIT-Sloan conference and made it clear the Spurs prefer a balanced approach to basketball analysis. For them, it’s neither all about crunching numbers, nor about relying on eyeballs only.

The Spurs’ balanced approach to defensive improvement began with Popovich re-emphasizing to each player on the first day of training camp that defensive excellence begins with focus on individual fundamentals and effort.

That’s basketball, pure and simple, but the analytics crowd can brag about the Spurs making changes to their defensive schemes that have been informed by all the numbers their computers have crunched.